A Proper Education for Girls (38 page)

Lilian rooted in her baggage. She tossed him a bottle. “My husband's.”

Mr. Hunter took a swig. He coughed, and squinted at the label. “Your husband had expensive tastes.”

“He could afford to, on the money my father gave him. Don't drink it all. I brought it for medicinal purposes.”

“Am I not in need of medicine?” said Mr. Hunter crossly. He rubbed his shoulder and touched his fingers to his still-throbbing nose. She had not bothered to ask how his injuries were. “You know, I feel quite feverish,” he said.

“You remind me of my husband,” said Lilian, prodding the fire. “He was always feeling unwell. Feverishness was one of his favorite complaints.”

Mr. Hunter took another gulp of brandy. It tasted slightly odd, now he thought about it, though perhaps that was simply the taste of the blood and dust that he had licked off his lips moments before. He watched as Lilian put a handful of sticks onto the fire. Why would she not comfort him? Could she not see that he was in pain? Could she not see that he was aching all over? “Where shall I sleep?” he said, watching with hopeful eyes as she unpacked a roll of bedding.

“Wherever you like,” said Lilian.

Mr. Hunter grinned. “In that case—”

“As long as it's not in with me.”

“Lily, please—” Mr. Hunter gave her a beseeching look. She seemed so distant and unattainable.

Lilian tossed him a blanket. She poured some warm water from the pot on the fire into a billy can and went over to him. Using a strip torn from the remains of his shirt, she bathed his face, wiping away the bloody slaverings that had congealed in black crusts about his hair and on his cheeks and eyebrows.

Mr. Hunter sat still and quiet while Lilian dabbed at his face. He wondered, for a moment, whether he should take the opportunity provided by this act of tenderness to seize her about the waist … but something told him that this would not be such a good idea. Besides, his head was swimming, and he was not sure whether he would be able successfully to execute such a movement without toppling onto the fire in a faint. So he contented himself with just looking at her dreamily, admiring the softness of her cheek and the curve of her lips as she bent over his face. He gave a contented sigh, blowing a draft of brandied breath into her face. Lilian gasped but said nothing. She wiped the last of the blood from his forehead.

Mr. Hunter sank back onto his blanket. Lilian's face seemed to be suspended above him, like a benign moon in a dark and troubled sky. Had he asked her to be his wife? He could not remember. He had thought about it for so long that now, as his head pounded and his vision blurred, he was almost certain that he had. “Will you be my wife, Lily?” he murmured, just to be on the safe side.

Lilian laid a cold damp hand on his blazing forehead.

Mr. Hunter repeated the question. At least, he tried to repeat it but he found that he could hardly get his lips to move and the words seemed as heavy as glue on his tongue. This time, even he didn't understand the sentence he had uttered. He began to shiver again. He stared up at her, but her face seemed to have receded into the distance. He saw her take off her turban, and loosen her hair so that it fell about her shoulders like ripples of sunlit water. How lovely she was! Would she not just lie down beside him to keep him warm?
He sighed happily, finding to his surprise that he no longer desired her but was simply contented to be in her company. The pain in his shoulder had abated, and the throbbing sensation in his nose and head seemed to have gone completely. Instead, these physical discomforts had been replaced with a feeling of well-being and inertia that seemed to lap around him like a warm, soothing bath. He closed his eyes as he felt Lilian's hand stroke his brow. He reached out to touch her, to kiss her fingers or to draw her close, but he found he could barely lift his arm. He felt the rim of the brandy bottle against his lips once more, and he drank deeply. After that, he felt nothing at all.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
Mr. Hunter was no better. If anything, he was worse. Thanks to the brandy he had drunk (which had been laced with opium), he had slept soundly all night. So soundly, in fact, that Lilian had trouble rousing him the next morning, and it was only by shaking him violently and shouting in his ear that he eventually resumed consciousness.

“You look terrible,” said Lilian, handing him a tin mug filled with strong black tea.

Mr. Hunter said nothing. He was, by turns, burning with heat and shivering with cold. He sipped the tea and ate some of the rice she had cooked the night before.

“Can you ride?” said Lilian, after she had packed everything away.

His shoulder was so stiff that he could hardly move his arm. Lilian helped him on with the dead
sepoy'
s jacket. “Just in case we meet any of your comrades,” she said.

They made slow progress. The path they followed was scarcely a path at all, and now and again Lilian had to dismount and hack away some of the low-lying branches. She used Mr. Vine's saber in place of a machete, which, although designed for less horticultural duties, performed the job well enough. As she labored among the foliage, Lilian was reminded of the long hours spent pruning back
the larger plants in the upper reaches of her father's conservatory. After all, the sweltering atmosphere was almost the same. At times it seemed to her as though the only thing missing was the distant throbbing of the hot-water pipes beneath their iron grids, the gentle burble of her aunts' voices as they played whist in their overgrown parlor far below, and Alice.

When they stopped—as they were obliged to do with tedious frequency to allow Mr. Hunter to totter into the bush to empty his gurgling bowels—Lilian pulled out her sketch pad and pencil. Mr. Hunter, for once, said nothing all day, apart from telling her that regardless of its appearance, the path they were on was the right one—as long as they continued in a northeasterly direction. Despite the warmth of the day he wrapped himself in a blanket. By evening he was draped across the neck of his horse, as though the heat had melted him like wax.

O
N THE MORNING
of the fourth day, Mr. Hunter seemed a little better. His shivers had abated and he was able to mount his horse unaided. He ate a bowl of rice and a
chapatti
. Thus fortified, he decided once more to ask Lilian to marry him. This time he would be sure to do so when there was no chance of being misunderstood: his brain would be unclouded by fever, his loins free from the misleading sensations of desire. He smoothed his hair and washed his face and did his best, using some spit and a rub with his sleeve, to remove some of the dirt from the dead
sepoy'
s uniform.

When Lilian's back was turned Mr. Hunter sneaked a look at his reflection in the back of a spoon. He was horrified to see how gaunt and yellow looking he was beneath his black whiskers and beard and tanned
badmash
face. Furthermore, even given the distortion of his reflection occasioned by the belly of the spoon he could see that his nose was still as bruised and swollen as an overripe pear, his eyes still bloodshot from the brandy he had been drinking. He looked like a drunk after a night spent brawling in the gutter. His confidence dimmed slightly. Perhaps he should wait a few days before he
made his ultimate declaration of love. At least until the sparkle in his eye had returned and he felt a little better—less tired and plagued by the residuum of aches and shivers. After all, once she had agreed to marry him he might be called upon to perform certain husbandly offices, and he wanted to have enough energy to oblige.

Mr. Hunter pushed his spoon out of sight. “I think it's a touch of malaria,” he declared. “I must have picked it up in Calcutta. The place is built on a swamp, you know. It's riddled with fevers. You must have noticed how yellow everyone looks.” He coughed lavishly and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. His bowels gurgled ominously. “Of course, the conditions in Darjeeling are perfect for cinchona cultivation. The Company could grow a whole plantation and have enough quinine to keep everyone free of malaria, including the natives. But for some reason those fools in Calcutta would rather keep shipping the stuff over from Peru at great expense and with little hope of ever having enough of it to do the job properly.” Mr. Hunter clambered onto his horse. His head was swimming and all at once he felt shivery and sick with fever. “Can't you cut us a path a bit quicker,” he said. “I can make faster progress as long as you look after me.”

“I see,” said Lilian, irritably.
“As long as I look after you
. You think only of yourself. As usual.”

“But I'm not well.”

“A touch of malaria is all you have.”

“It could kill me. And we must move on, or the rebels may kill us both.”

“Oh, of course,” said Lilian. Her voice had become shrill, and it grated on his ears painfully. “You just want to run away as soon as things become slightly uncomfortable, don't you? That's what you do, isn't it? You take what you want and then run away.”

Mr. Hunter looked startled. “The world has turned upside down,” he said. “How much more uncomfortable could it be?”

But Lilian was still talking. “You think of yourself first, and you leave the moment things get a bit hot. You care nothing for the consequences of your actions. You have no interest in what sort of
trouble you might leave behind you. What kind of a man
are
you, Mr. Hunter, that you can behave in such a way?”

He put a hand to his throbbing head. He did not know what she was talking about. “It's quiet now, but that's only because we're away from Kushpur. But we're not
that
far away. Come on Lily, you know what's going on.”

“I thought you were friends with the natives? What can you possibly have to fear from them?” She rammed the bag of rice into her saddlebag. Her face was furious.

“There are plenty of them who are not my friends, I can assure you. And right now any one of them would be glad to slit my throat.”

“The fathers of women whose honor you've ruined, perhaps?” muttered Lilian. She threw him a dark look.

Mr. Hunter rubbed his sweating forehead. “What on earth are you talking about, Lily? Those
nautch
girls don't have fathers. Besides,” he added gruffly, “those days are over. I've not been there for months.”

“What are you talking about?” said Lilian crossly.

“Nothing. Those girls.”

“What ‘girls?’” Lilian looked appalled. “How many of us have there been?”

“How many of whom?” said Mr. Hunter desperately. “Why are we talking about this now? It doesn't matter, surely?”

“It doesn't
matter?”
Lilian's voice echoed through the forest. “I should think it matters very much. Unless
I
don't matter. Don't you understand? You left me. You ran away and left me in the hands of that … that …
murderer
! And you think that doesn't
matter?”

“Murderer? You mean Selwyn?”

“You!” shouted Lilian. “You left me to that … so-called
doctor
, with his cold, horrible hands and his knives and his hooks …”

Mr. Hunter blinked. How bright the sunlight seemed as it steamed through the branches of the chir pine overhead. It hurt his eyes and made them water. He knew the day was warm, but he felt as chilled as a corpse. He wished Lilian would stop talking and
mount her pony. What use was there in going over the carnage they had witnessed? Far better to try to forget the whole monstrous business. “Knives and hooks?” he said. “Come now, Lily you must try to put everything behind you. You're very upset. And no wonder! You've seen some frightful things.”

“Upset!” cried Lilian. “Frightful things!”

“Anyway” added Mr. Hunter briskly “Dr. Mossly is dead. Now we really must be getting along. We can talk about all this later. Come
on
, Lily.”

A
T FIRST
, L
ILIAN
had not intended to say anything to Mr. Hunter about her fate at the hands of Dr. Cattermole. Riding away from her bungalow (how long ago it seemed), as Mr. Hunter and the other Europeans awaited her in the parlor, she had thought that disappearing from his life would be vengeance enough. After all, did he not deserve to have his heart broken? And besides, she could hardly bear to remind herself of the events that had led to her quitting the great house and leaving Alice behind. Having to repeat them by way of explanation would simply have made her weep in front of him, and this she had resolved never to do.

But since then she had shot a man; she had almost cut another man's hand off; she had passed through a swirling sea of bloodshed, had seen brutality on such a scale unfolding before her eyes that she had been unable to turn away, but had stared at it, as though into the maw of hell, fixated with horror and disbelief. Now she found that the memory of her own butchery, and of the murder of her unborn child, had returned to her with a fearful clarity. The pain she had thought was deeply buried inside her heart had risen up, so that the words she uttered seemed to bubble with fury into her mouth, hardly coherent even to herself. Her sense of outrage, her feelings of anger and humiliation at Mr. Hunter's abandonment, and everything that had followed on from that, now blazed within her as forcefully as on the day he had left.

The acts of violence and violation that she had endured had gone unpunished; the death of her child had been without retribution.

B
Y THE AFTERNOON
Mr. Hunter was worse again. That night Lilian gave him a large draft of brandy, just to stop him from shrieking in his delirium.

In the morning, Mr. Hunter was still asleep. He murmured something indistinct but lay without moving beneath his blanket. Lilian made a fire to heat some water. She made some tea but decided to wait until he stirred before preparing any breakfast. In the meantime, she erected her easel and took out her watercolors. Now that the sun had risen she could see through the gaps in the conifers. They were in a clearing overlooking a forest-clad valley, at the bottom of which a river twisted and tumbled. She could see wisps of cloud hanging above the trees, snagged on the tallest branches or caught, here and there, in a breezeless hollow. Other than the sound of birds and insects, and the far-off roar of the river, the place was silent.